Update: Dell resumes Inspiron XPS shipments after delay

Dell Inc. has resumed shipments of the Inspiron XPS system, its first notebook computer aimed exclusively at gaming enthusiasts, after a problem with the notebook caused the company to hold over deliveries of the notebook until last week.

“We saw a condition with both the Inspiron XPS and the Inspiron 9100: we determined the root cause, fixed it, tested it and it is now resolved. Shipments of the laptops were on hold but resumed last week,” Dell spokesman Venancio Figueroa, said Wednesday.

Figueroa declined to reveal the nature of the problem, how many customers were affected by the “condition” or shipment delays and was uncertain of when the shipment hold was initially put in place by the Round Rock, Texas, company.

“The problem was spotted at Dell and we took the initiative to fix it on behalf of Dell customers,” Figueroa said.

Launched last month, the Inspiron XPS system is loaded with the type of processing power, graphics and sound that gamers demand. The notebook comes with an Intel Corp. Pentium 4 or Pentium 4 Extreme Edition processor running at 3.4GHz and ATI Technologies Inc.’s Mobility Radeon 9700 graphics card with 128M bytes of memory. It also has a 60G-byte or 80G-byte hard drive, 512M bytes to 2G bytes of DDR RAM (Double Data Rate Random Access Memory) running at 400MHz, a DVD-RW drive, four USB 2.0 ports and an IEEE 1394 port.

According to postings on both the notebookforums.com and Dell forum Web sites, users have been experiencing lock up and display corruption problems with both the Inspiron XPS and the lower-priced Inspiron 9100. The majority of the postings point to faulty cards, such as the ATI Radeon 9700 graphics card, as the root of the problem.

Figueroa said the problem was not related to a graphics card. As for reports that expensive on-site technical service has been required for some units that did ship, Figueroa said he had no knowledge of any such cases.

‘”Some of the reports out there are inaccurate, but we are not going to disclose specifics,” Figueroa said. “We’re currently working through our orders, making sure that customers can receive their notebooks as soon as we build them and ship them, and we are working on decreasing delays.”

The Inspiron XPS is competing with other gaming laptops from Alienware Corp., Hypersonic PC Systems and VoodooPC Ltd. Figueroa said that Dell is not releasing numbers indicating how many Inspiron XPS and the Inspiron 9100 notebooks have been shipped or ordered, and isn’t commenting on if sales of the notebooks are above, below or on Dell’s targets.